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Wednesday, July 15, 2015

It’s tough to extort money from communities if you don’t have viable cities as options.

Montreal, Charlotte, North Carolina, San Antonio, Portland, Oregon, Las Vegas, Oklahoma City, northern New Jersey, Mexico City or Monterrey, Mexico, are among the markets that could eventually land on baseball’s radar as potential locations for new or relocated franchises.

Monday, May 18, 2015

These players were good enough to get the Angels to 70 wins in their inaugural season and 86 victories in their second. The Mets would not be so lucky. By pushing the expansion draft date forward by two months, National League owners made a repeat of the damage done by the Angels in the first expansion draft impossible. With the earlier expansion draft date, the list of players available to the Mets and fellow expansion franchise Houston Colt .45s included none of the hot young talents that made the Angels early success possible. Instead, the new franchises were picking from the ranks of aging veterans, utility players and swingmen who would have certainly been released to make room for protected minor leaguers come December.

On Oct. 10, 1961, after Yogi Berra, Whitey Ford and the Yankees polished off the Reds in a tidy five-game World Series victory, the Mets and Colt .45s filled out their rosters for the 1962 season. Both teams were required to select 16 players at a price of $75,000 each and four “premium players” at $125,000 each. Among the “premium players” were Colt .45s selection Joe Amalfitano, a 28-year-old third baseman with a .263/.330/.333 line and three home runs in 260 games played for the Giants; Don Zimmer, then a 31-year-old utility infielder with a .238/.291/.378 career line in 697 games between the Dodgers and Cubs (and an inexplicable All-Star Game appearance in 1960 behind a .252/.291/.403 batting line); and 25-year-old pitcher Jay Hook, who had posted a 5.23 ERA in 56 starts for Cincinnati and allowed a league-high 31 home runs for the Reds in 1960.